Over the last decade in general, and the last three years in particular, I have been doing increasingly intense work with electional astrology and astrological images, culminating (so far) in an ever-expanding series of metal talismans cast in my home studio. But, as any of you who are in the arts in general, and jewelry in particular, know, neither art nor magic are science, and results are sometimes perfect. Casting, in particular, is a bit finnicky, and the vagaries of combining the process with spirit conjuration only complicates the process.
So far, most of the time, the issues have been minor. Some of the coin talismans had been meant to be pendants, but the bail didn’t cast correctly. In those instances, I just cut off the nubs with no harm to the metal talisman or complaint from the talismanic spirit.
In most cases where more intense intervention was necessary, I kept the talisman for myself and worked with the spirit to determine what was needed to achieve our mutual ends. My Mars talisman, for example, had been meant to have three jump rings, but only the bottom one cast. I made him a frame so that I could wear him as a necklace, rather than string him on prayer beads, and hung a Roman arrow head from the bottom ring.
The case of my Jupiter talismans was more extreme. One talisman had a hole in the blank space over the lion-man’s bolt, and two of his three jump rings had failed. Working with him, I tube-set an emerald in that hole and built him a silver frame so that I could string him on lapis and moonstone prayer beads. A second talisman had mis-cast more drastically, missing one of her hands and a great deal of the thinner parts of the talisman had cold-shut, leaving negative space in the background talismanic image. I thought that I was, finally, going to have to figure out a funerary process for failed talismans – but the spirit informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she wanted to live. And so I made a frame for her, as well, with “wings” that would clip into my cuff bracelet. They were not the strongest talismans I’ve made, but they’ve been growing stronger as I work with them, and they have been good and loyal familiars.
At the second of August’s Mercury in Virgo elections, however, the inevitable finally happened: one of the talismans I cast failed entirely. The problem was on the jewelry end of things: I didn’t get a good enough seal between the flask and the vacuum of the casting machine. If it hadn’t been an elected cast, I’d have had more than a few seconds to fuck with it and get a better seal. But it was and I didn’t.
The talisman was barely there, a cartoon crescent moon where there should have been a full disk. At first I thought there wasn’t even enough there to catch as spirit. As I cut it off the sprue, though, I could feel the spirit in the metal: struggling to manifest, but without enough material or image to fully enter the world – but too much to just leave on its own.
I didn’t ask its name. That seemed like an insult. I just held it in my hands and apologized. I asked what it needed. It needed the fragment to be destroyed, rendered unrecognizable as even the attempt at a talisman. That was absolutely in my power.
I took the crescent nub to my soldering block and turned on my torch. As I put fire to metal, I apologized again and reached out my psychic hands to cradle the spirit as I pulled it softly from the melting metal. I continued apologizing to the spirit, promising that it would have another chance at life in the material world when next I came to a Mercury election.
The brass burned blue as I melted it and resisted being slagged at temperatures that should have melted it readily. But the metal gave, eventually, and when it did, curling into a ball as best as brass can, the spirit came free. With a final apology, I released the spirit to return to its sphere.
Sometimes casts fail, even when there’s magic involved. I’ve been afraid of something like this happening since I started casting elected talismans for my friends back in 2020. In a sense, I’m glad that it finally happened, because now I know how to handle it, and that I can, and that – approached properly – it’s not as traumatic to either magician or spirit as I was afraid that it might be.
I’m also glad that it happened because it answered a question that has been with me since I first heard about spirit conjuration magic back in the 1990s. The spirits we call – or at least the ones that come when I throw my consecrated casts – are here because they want to be. There is something about incarnating as a talisman spirit that is appealing to them. They all want to live.
